FATHERING THE MAN

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Fathering the man
into a basket,
I smuggled him out of the hospital
under the nurses’ noses.
His cries were convincing,
and he put up no fight.
Ungainly, with a look of sawdust at the joints,
and the bags of his eyes penumbrous,
he favours the corners of the house,
and stands like a disgraced salesman.
Guests praise him for his tallness,
but he shrinks from their attention,
until they are skirting
in apology
around the head of a pin.
His movements are sublimated
acts of mastication
in a pantomime of hunger –
but he will take only soup,
and holds his spoon feebly.
When I look him in the eye
he begins to wilt –
first at the cheeks,
next the neck,
the backs of his hands –
then his spoon clatters to the table
and he falls like a raisin into his soup.
So I have taken to watching him secretly,
from the sink, or by the window,
knowing that he wants to be watched,
secretly.
But there are moments of brazenness too,
when I can’t look away for the sight of him,
and he marches from one end of the house to the other in a single step,
and the walls weep for his sleeplessness,
and the floor shakes from his temper,
and the doors unhinge themselves and lay flat,
and the switches flip in alarm,
and every insect drowns itself in the bath,
and the radiators boil in desperation,
and the curtains twitch in mortification,
and the garden flees to a nearby hill
with the fence lagging behind,
and the council contrives some sort of bill
to explain away the disruption.
But mostly, he is quiet, and about the size of an unwatered shrub.
Sometimes I enjoy a small success,
and stay out late,
wearing a badge, maybe,
in celebration of my small success,
and when I come home
he scurries like a woodlouse
beneath the sink.
Later, as I am undressing,
he appears next to my bed,
like the blowing of a bulb,
and holds out his hand,
and since it is dark and I am tired
I hand him my clothes.
In the winter I hardly see him,
and would maybe think him gone,
but whenever I turn on a tap
there is his hand,
limescaled at the wrist,
palm upwards
and beggarly.
In the spring the landlord has the pipes changed,
and I see him again in the kitchen,
hangdog at the elbows,
with my old school tie askew on his neck.
April:
he will not come inside,
and when I peer above
the melting snowcrests of the windows,
I see him
orbiting the line of his shadow
in the garden,
like a crooked dial
consigned to an ailing star.
I am not without pity,
but I have begun to lose money
in dreams,
and we have always been poor.
Cleaning the gutters after the thaw,
I find the perished year like an old beehive
not yet cleared out.
Soon they pop up everywhere,
until we can’t move for them,
and the two of us become small as moths,
skittering across the mounds.
We sold the house,
but could not shift the years.
We sit in the evening
in a space cleared out
among the piles.
I had hoped, once,
that he would keep me young,
but in the end it’s I who bathe him,
scrub his back and sing him songs.
And when I ask him to splay his hands
to see if his nails are clean,
all the little things I had lost and forgot
scatter across the bathroom floor.